Carroll

Perhaps its mind blowing, or perhaps it’s just quietly strange. We know and fathom little about our world. 12 people have ever walked the moon. Yet there’s a whole subset of humans who believe we never went to the moon and the Earth is flat. Most of our oceans have never been explored. Few understand dark matter and quantum mechanics. Most have never read the work of Shakespeare, let alone Dostoevsky. Few have googled how Van Gogh lost his ear. Most don’t understand that the Easter Bunny, hard boiled eggs and the entire Easter ritual is based on Germanic pagan Spring rituals of rebirth and renewal. We’ve barely started exploring our own solar system, we, as a planet do not have the ability to protect ourselves from a solar flare, or a strike from a stray asteroid or comet. We still don’t know all the secrets of the Great Pyramid, while humans practice more than 4,000 religions worshipping a variety of Gods. We separate ourselves by our religions and the amount of melanin in our skins.

With the number of things we don’t know and don’t understand about each other, you’d think that we’d try to stick together to figure it all out. But we don’t. I stare at the moon and wonder.

I came across something recently that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.

The brightest spot on the darkest side of the moon that was named “Carroll.” Not after a scientist or a historical figure or a scientific phenomenon—but after someone someone loved. Just a person. A piece of someone’s life, carried all the way out there.

And I don’t know why that gets to me as much as it does, but it really does. Maybe it’s because space, in my head, has always been this cold, distant thing. All precision and science and achievement. And then suddenly, in the middle of all that, there’s this very human instinct—to name something after someone you care about. To leave a trace of love somewhere unfathomably far away.

It feels almost out of place. But also exactly right.

And then I read about the first interview after the Artemis crew came back. They were asked what they learned, what they discovered—and they said the science is all there, it’ll be studied, written about, explained. But what they wanted to talk about were the three most incredible human experiences they had in space.

Gratitude.

Joy.

Love.

That’s it.

Not the distance. Not the history of it. Not even the fact that they went farther than most people ever will. Just that.

That undoes me a little. We spend so much of our lives thinking we need to do something big for things to matter – achieve something, prove something, become something more. But then you have moments like this—where people leave the planet, see things most of us can’t even imagine, and still come back talking about feelings we experience here, all the time, in the smallest ways. It makes everything feel simpler. In a good way.

"Love isn't something that we invented. It's observable. Powerful. It has to mean something. Maybe it means something more, something we can't yet understand. Maybe it's some evidence, some artifact of a higher dimension that we can't consciously perceive. Love is the one thing that we're capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space." 

-Dr Brand, Interstellar

It feels obvious. Of course we carry love with us. Of course we take it everywhere, even into places that were never meant for it. Of course we try to leave pieces of it behind. Even on the darkest side of the moon.

There’s so much we don’t understand about the world, about each other. But then there are these small, quiet reminders that maybe the core of it all is actually very simple.

You love people. And they stay with you.

Sometimes in the way you look at the moon. Sometimes in the things you name. Sometimes in the way you keep showing up, even when there’s nothing impressive about it.